Embracing Limits A Radical and Necessary Approach to the Environmental Crisis

About this book

Radical measures are necessary.

Climate change is only the best known of the many environmental crises that now threaten human civilization. It may not even be the most serious one. Today's civilization is like a kid with a credit card, thinking the party will never end. Politically speaking, there are no adults in the room. Perhaps there never were. The area of land turned into desert or otherwise rendered unfarmable by humans is now larger than the area being farmed – which is itself being destroyed by the very methods used to farm it. Methods that depend heavily on fossil fuels every step of the way. Meanwhile, the ever-more difficult extraction of the ever-rarer resources needed to manufacture the ever-expanding number of products our civilization requires (or desires) to keep itself going cannot be sustained. We live on a finite planet with finite resources – a fact that the world's economies, based as they are on the concept of infinite expansion, refuse to acknowledge. Recycling bottles, putting up windmills, and driving electric cars isn't going to cut it. We're told it will, because it's comforting to think that small changes will save us. We – all of us – need to make massive changes, now. Nothing less will do. This book details the challenges we face – and the solutions that may save us.

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Biography

Keith Akers is a writer, speaker, and activist. He's also the author of Disciples (Apocryphile Press, 2013), The Lost Religion of Jesus (Lantern Books, 2000), and A Vegetarian Sourcebook (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1983), and numerous articles on the environment and plant-based diets. In his former life as a computer consultant, he worked on projects with the US Departments of State and Education, American Management Systems, Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile (now Verizon), and others.